H. Wells - The World Set Free

and most of them with a common occupation. They lie out in the

former deserts, these long wasted sun-baths of the race, they

tower amidst eternal snows, they hide in remote islands, and bask

on broad lagoons. For a time the whole tendency of mankind was to

desert the river valleys in which the race had been cradled for

half a million years, but now that the War against Flies has been

waged so successfully that this pestilential branch of life is

nearly extinct, they are returning thither with a renewed

appetite for gardens laced by watercourses, for pleasantliving

amidst islands and houseboats and bridges, and for nocturnal

lanterns reflected by the sea.

Man who is ceasingto be an agricultural animal becomes more and

more a builder, a traveller, and a maker. How much he ceasesto

be a cultivator of the soil the returns of the Redistribution

Committee showed. Every year the work of our scientific

laboratories increases the productivity and simplifies the labour

of those who work upon the soil, and the food now of the whole

world is produced by less than one per cent. of its population, a

percentage which still tends to decrease. Far fewer people are

needed upon the land than training and proclivity disposetowards

it, and as a consequence of this excess of human attention, the

garden side of life, the creation of groves and lawns and vast

regions of beautiful flowers, has expanded enormously and

continuesto expand. For, as agricultural method intensifies and

the quota is raised, one farm association after another, availing

itself of the 1975 regulations, elects to produce a public garden

and pleasaunce in the place of its former fields, and the area of

freedom and beauty is increased. And the chemists' triumphs of

synthesis, which could now give us an entirely artificial food,

remain largely in abeyance because it is so much more pleasant

and interesting to eat natural produce and to growsuch things

upon the soil. Each year adds to the variety of our fruits and

the delightfulness of our flowers.

Section 9

The early years of the World Republic witnessed a certain

recrudescence of political adventure. There was, it is rather

curious to note, no revival of separatism after the face of King

Ferdinand Charles had vanished from the sightof men, but in a

number of countries, as the first urgent physical needs were met,

there appeared a variety of personalities having this in common,

that they sought to revive political trouble and clamber by its

aid to positions of importance and satisfaction. In no case did

they speak in the name of kings, and it is clear that monarchy

must have been far gone in obsolescence before the twentieth

century began, but they made appeals to the large survivals of

nationalist and racial feelingthat were everywhere to be found,

they alleged with considerable justice that the council was

overriding racial and national customs and disregarding religious

rules. The great plain of India was particularly prolific in such

agitators. The revival of newspapers, which had largely ceased

during the terrible year because of the dislocation of the

coinage, gave a vehicle and a method of organisation to these

complaints. At first the council disregarded this developing

opposition, and then it recognised it with an entirely

devastating frankness.

Never, of course, had there been so provisional a government. It

was of an extravagant illegality. It was, indeed, hardly more

than a club, a club of about a hundred persons. At the outset

there were ninety-three, and these were increased afterwards by

the issue of invitations which more than balanced its deaths, to

as many at one time as one hundred and nineteen. Always its

constitution has been miscellaneous. At no time were these

invitations issued with an admission that they recognised a

right. The old institution or monarchy had come out unexpectedly

well in the light of the new regime. Nine of the original members

of the first government were crowned heads who had resigned their

separate sovereignty, and at no time afterwards did the number of

its royal members sink below six. In their case there was perhaps

a kind of attenuated claim to rule, but except for them and the

still more infinitesimal pretensions of one or two ax-presidents

of republics, no member of the council had even the shade of a

right to his participation in its power. It was natural,

therefore, that its opponents should find a common ground in a

clamour for representative government, and build high hopes upon

a return, to parliamentary institutions.

The council decided to give them everything they wanted, but in a

formthat suited ill with their aspirations. It became at one

stroke a representative body. It became, indeed, magnificently

representative. It became so representative that the politicians

were drowned in a deluge of votes. Every adult of either sex

from pole to pole was given a vote, and the world was divided

into ten constituencies, which voted on the same day by means of

a simple modification of the world post. Membership of the

government, it was decided, must be for life, save in the

exceptional case of a recall; but the elections, which were held

quinquenially, were arranged to add fifty members on each

occasion. The method of proportional representation with one

transferable vote was adopted, and the voter might also write

upon his voting paper in a specially marked space, the name of

any of his representatives that he wished to recall. A ruler was

recallable by as many votes as the quota by which he had been

elected, and the original members by as many votes in any

constituency as the returning quotas in the first election.

Upon these conditionsthe council submitted itself very

cheerfully to the suffrages of the world. None of its members

were recalled, and its fifty new associates, which included

twenty-seven which it had seenfit to recommend, were of an

altogether too miscellaneous quality to disturb the broad trend

of its policy. Its freedom from rules or formalities prevented

any obstructive proceedings, and when one of the two newly

arrived Home Rule members for India sought for information how to

bring in a bill, they learnt simply that bills were not brought

in. They asked for the speaker, and were privileged to hearmuch

ripe wisdomfrom the ex-king Egbert, who was now consciously

among the seniors of the gathering. Thereafter they were baffled

men…

But already by that time the work of the council was drawing to

an end. It was concerned not so much for the continuationof its

construction as for the preservation of its accomplished work

from the dramatic instincts of the politician.

The life of the race becomes indeed more and more independent of

the formal government. The council, in its opening phase, was

heroic in spirit; a dragon-slaying body, it slashed out of

existencea vast, knotted tangle of obsolete ideas and clumsy and

jealousproprietorships; it secured by a noblesystem of

institutional precautions, freedom of inquiry, freedom of

criticism, free communications, a common basis of education and

understanding, and freedom from economic oppression. With that

its creative task was accomplished. It became more and more an

established security and less and less an active intervention.

There is nothing in our time to correspond with the continual